This seems steep. Was there anyone else going to make a big play for him?
The Detroit Pistons traded for Reggie Jackson last season, and he finished the year strong once he adjusted to Stan Van Gundy’s system. He looked good running the pick-and-roll with Andre Drummond. It was expected that the Pistons would want to retain him.
They did — for five years at $80 million. So reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports.Restricted free-agent guard Reggie Jackson has reached agreement on a five-year, $80 million extension with the Detroit Pistons, league sources told Yahoo Sports.
Pistons president and coach Stan Van Gundy wanted to fully commit to Jackson as one of the franchise’s cornerstones and will do so with a substantial investment of $16 million per season. There is no player option in the contract, league sources said.
The question here isn’t should the Pistons have kept him — they did the right thing. He averaged 17.6 points a game with a PER of 19.8 after being traded to the Pistons (and his numbers near the end of the season were better than that). This is a guy they wanted to retain, someone Van Gundy sees as the future point guard for the Pistons.
The question is, did they have to pay him that much?
The Thunder a season ago offered him four-years, $48 million ($12 million per year) and he turned it down — that proved to be the smart move.
The Pistons rewarded him as a cornerstone player, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else saw him that way and would have bid within $10 million of that total price (if even that high). The Pistons could have let the market set his price and matched it. It’s a cold business, but the Pistons could have saved some money here.
That said, SVG lost Greg Monroe this year to a qualifying offer. He couldn’t risk that again, maybe that motivated the offer.
Also, with the cap about to spike by $40 million or so over two years thanks to the new television deal, the pain from overpaying a little here is not that serious. If he is as good as SVG believes, locking him in at this price will be a steal in a few years.